1. Field
One or more embodiments of the present invention relate to moving images, and, more particularly, to a system, method and medium of organizing templates for generating moving images so that a user may more easily create moving images.
2. Description of the Related Art
Slideshow presentations are one of the most widely adopted methods for displaying a number of content items such as photos. In a slide show, a plurality of content items, such as photos, are displayed one after another at regular time intervals. With the slideshow presentation, the playback of content may be interrupted for a predetermined period of time, suggesting that a slideshow can only display content in a non-successive manner, and thus may not be able to freely organize content according to a user's preference. Thus, the slideshow presentation is not appropriate to best cope with the recent trend in user's demand for personalized images and dynamic presentations created from the images.
Also, since, in a slideshow, only one content item is displayed at a time, a user may not be able to intuitively determine the correlation between previous, current, and subsequent content items, and to render the content items in various manners. That is, since a slideshow is a static display of content items at regular time intervals, a user may not be able to intuitively determine the correlation between the content items even if the content items are photos taken at the same place.
Therefore, in order to overcome the problems with the conventional monotonous slideshow presentation method, additional objects such as stickers and captions may be added to content, and various dynamic effects such as zoom, pan, and tilt may be added to content. Conventional slideshow methods, however, simply display content in the same manner and are thus still insufficient to meet various user demands.
Although the production of moving images based on personal content is on the increase in terms of frequency, conventional tools for content creation still require users to acquire professional expertise. In addition, it is difficult to transform user-created content to a compatibly formatted content that can be transmitted to or shared with different types of devices. In order to address this problem, various techniques of enhancing user convenience by creating a moving image based on user-created content have been suggested. These techniques enable users to create a moving image based on a collection of various content items, and thus apply the moving image to a home server through transmitting and sharing it. Moving images are execution-module-based images created based on photos, digital photos, and music sources possessed by individuals. Examples of moving images include Macromedia's Shockwave Flash (SWF) files created using the Flash animation software program.
Moving images are distinguished from video sequences which can be compressed or decompressed by MPEG or H.264 codecs. A moving image may include a plurality of content items which can be controlled independently of one another, whereas a video sequence may include various images which merely comprise pixel data, and which cannot be controlled independently of one another. Video sequences are regarded as content items that can be included in a moving image.
In order to create a moving image, it is necessary to develop functions capable of satisfying user demands by constructing various content items into a moving image and adding various effects to the moving image. In the meantime, the production and sharing of content by users has become commonplace, and such content is referred to as user-created content (UCC).
With the increasing presence of UCC, templates, which are tools for helping users to easily create moving images based on their personal content, have become widespread. However, even though templates can maximize user convenience by helping users to easily create moving images, there is a clear limit in the flexibility of templates. Thus, in order to create various moving images, it is necessary to provide users with a considerable number and variety of templates.
Users would like to produce creative moving images and replace template elements such as background images or stickers with their own pictures. In order to satisfy such user demands, it is necessary to develop effective tools for helping ordinary users easily create and organize templates for creating moving images.
In general, in order for ordinary users to easily use template-organizing tools, template-organizing tools must be able to create a template with only a few mouse manipulations, to operate properly even in connection with moving-image-generation tools, and to provide time-structured images so that users can easily perform various control operations such as rewind, skip, and arbitrary access operations on moving images.
Most organizing functions provided by conventional template-organizing tools are classified as timeline organizing functions such as those provided by Flash for creating time-structured images. FIG. 1 illustrates the setting of timelines 22 for content 21 for creating a time-structured image using Flash.
Referring to FIG. 1, a user must manually designate a timeline 22 for each object (such as a photo, a sticker, or a background). The designation of a timeline 22 must be performed whenever a new object is added or whenever an existing object is modified. Once the designation of timelines 22 for all objects that constitute a moving image is complete, the moving image can be played back in units of frames or a time-seek operation can be performed on the moving image.
However, it is difficult for non-expert users to create moving images using conventional template-organizing tools. Therefore, it is necessary to develop template-organizing tools capable of enabling templates to be time-seekable even when the templates are constructed simply by selecting elements without consideration of timelines.